The Shift

Caught in the Middle

In an unfamiliar place in life and on the bike, he aims for the next bend in the road

mark levine

(Photo by Keith Negley)

It’s early spring and the sun is just beginning to fade. I’ve got the blacktop to myself. It’s my first time on Sugar Bottom Road, a faint squiggle on the map between Nothing and Nowhere. A sign promises twists and turns for the next 6 miles. The road is narrow, hemmed in by unruly trees and shrubs through which I can barely make out the occasional house in the distance—an old farmstead here, a McMansion there. Otherwise, I might as well be on one of those closed fantasy roads featured in car commercials. There’s a light wind at my back and I’m moving along at a good clip, rarely able to see more than 50 yards ahead before the pavement disappears into a turn. This is road bliss, I think. This is what I want to feel on a bike—speed, freedom, total focus—and somehow I hadn’t dared to think the feeling was still possible.

I come through a clearing, undulating high grasses on both sides, and see the road drop in front of me. I crouch low and rifle downhill. I can’t see where the road turns at the bottom. Still, I relax into the speed, hands touching brakes but applying no pressure. For a moment I think: What would my wife say? And I remind myself: Think of your kids. I bounce onto a bridge at the bottom, then lean into the blind turn, hesitate, and lose my nerve—or come to my senses—and slow down just around the bend where an oncoming car greets me. There’s a rambling, dilapidated barn in a meadow that looks as though it might have come out of a rustic painting. Up ahead, the road climbs at something like a 15 percent grade. I stay in the saddle as long as I can, until I’m virtually motionless, then stand and grope my way uphill. More bliss. This could be New England, I tell myself. This could be California. I could be 25 and staying with a group of friends in a country house in the south of France, wine and conversation all night, writing and riding all day.

But that would be another life, another ride. In this one the realities are different. A few years ago, I moved to a small town in the middle of the country. Iowa: It’s not many cyclists’ vision of paradise. It wasn’t mine, either. Indeed, it felt like something of a defeat to move there. I was giving up on a 20-year effort to make a go of it on sexier, more dramatic terrain—first, the overpowering, mostly vacant expanses of Montana; then, the compulsive, cramped spaces of New York City. These were the two extremes that had defined my life. One place was dominated by the natural landscape: rock, water, forest, sky, silence. The other place was the supreme expression of man-made clamor. In one, you could ride in the woods all day and expect not to see another person. In the other, you threaded a line through every imaginable obstacle, a kind of urban cyclocross. Both were stunning and sometimes hard places in which to ride, all tight corners and sudden turns, steep drops, constant adjustments. I had been committed to that kind of riding and that kind of living. It was always a new ride, a new beginning.

Then, telling myself it would be a temporary move, I decamped to what I had long considered to be the soft center of the country.­ I was motivated by the usual dull practicalities: money, space, childcare, ­sanity. Suddenly I found myself with a regular paycheck, a house with a backyard, and a parking spot whenever I wanted one, all set within a pleasing and seemingly nondescript landscape. Iowa? Ohio? Idaho? To my friends in New York, these were interchangeable entities—the kinds of in-between places you see from an airplane, laid out in immaculate rectangles, as you fly from one coast to the other. Like most people, I prefer the edges of things, beginnings and endings, fresh starts and hair-raising finales, the wild new romance, the shattering breakup. Middles are tougher to appreciate: middle of the road, middlebrow, midpack, middle-class, and, most dreaded of all, middle age. “Midway through the journey of our life I came to a dark wood where the path had been lost”: Dante’s words, written 700 years ago as he set out on a tour of Hell.

Still, I found that there were unexpected compensations to be had. It helps that I no longer have to hang my bike from a wall in my living room, and that I can leave my front door and clear the last stoplight between there and open road within five minutes. But it’s more than that. Setting off today, I was aware that I need the bike—the challenge, the isolation, the meditative intensity—in a way I never have before. I need the sensation of self-­presence that rooting myself to the saddle can provide. But I also need the neighboring sensation of occasional escape—the traverse of town, exurb, farmland, woods, and lake that makes me feel I’m traveling far from my life at the end of the workday, yet can still be home in time for dinner.

I’ve barely begun to explore this amorphous midway that is my new home. I learned a few things as soon as I tuned up my bike and got my legs moving. My old friends all say to me, “It must be flat there.” It’s not. The retreat of the Wisconsin glaciers, about 12,000 years back, left behind a landscape of ridges and corrugations and rolling hills, exactly like what I find on Sugar Bottom Road. It’s not the Rockies, but today, at least, it’s rarely dull, and often ­sublime—although in a subtle way. The landscape lends itself perfectly to thinking about the quiet ­hardships and satisfactions of the middle of one’s life. My current ride isn’t the screaming, winding descent or the sprint through the center of world finance and culture, but it is, perhaps, a kind of riding that is closer to what reality is for most of us—a matter of long, sometimes arduous middles, lacking in signposts or in obvious guides as to where to go next and how to get there.

When the last hill on Sugar Bottom tops out, the landscape opens up, prairie grasses fringing fields of lumpy black soil that haven’t yet been planted and still seem to wear a sheen of frost. The road ends abruptly at a stop sign. I’d like to keep going—on a day like this, I’d like to ride on and on—but I still don’t quite know where I am, and the daylight is vanishing. I’ll have to save further exploration for another day. It’s okay. The road isn’t going anywhere, and neither am I. I turn and retrace my route. The light is different, the wind is different, the uphills have become downhills, and the turns are reversed. The road is still fun, hard, and beautiful, still a revelation, and from this direction it’s an entirely new experience.